I had a job interview! The first interview of a new job search is always the toughest, in my opinion, but thankfully I had a head-start on this one since I had already done a phone-screen with the hiring manager. We had hit it off pretty well, and I wasn’t so much nervous as I was worried – the position was nearly perfect, and would help me along my “next few years” plan quite well.

But above all else, the part about the interview that most excited me (aside from possibly being a job) was that it was on Long Island, and they had booked me a hotel room for the night before the interview itself. My plan was to drive down two days early, crash with my buddy Big T in Connecticut, and then drive the last hour or so to Long Island the day before the interview, giving me more than enough time to deal with any problems that came up.

The downside to roadtrips like this is that there aren’t any really good long stories to tell about it. So I’ve condensed the few unique adventures into the bullets below:

• T and I spent the afternoon I arrived getting caught in a rainstorm on the beach while trying to light up cigars in the face of the ocean breeze. The rain led to an impromptu mile run, but unfortunately the cigar-lighting ended in dreary failure for the both of us.
• We worked our way through three episodes of Smallville while playing the drinking game of “whenever he should be kissing the girl, but says something dumb instead”. Or at least… we tried to play that game. Instead we gave up after the first bottle of wine was gone before the half-way point of the first episode…
• Thanks to T’s insane wine collection, I woke up with a hangover for the first time since I left New Zealand. Like a Boss.
• For the first time in my memory, I was propositioned by a “lady of the night”. Not 5min after I walked through the front door of the hotel a rather stunning woman walked up to me and hopped in the elevator that I was taking. She stood just close enough for me to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that she was interested in me, and then she asked what I was up to that night… and whether I “wanted any company”. I turned her down… but it was tough, I admit.
• I swear, the main actor from Breaking Bad was sitting across from me when I had breakfast at the hotel’s grill. He looked like he was having a great time, but I half expected him to pull some meth out of his backpack, or start shooting everyone in sight. He didn’t, thankfully.